I had decided that I wanted to learn as much as possible about the Race, so I decided that I wanted to see the arrival of the boats into Liverpool. So, we found a place in AirBnB near Liverpool and drove there the night before the planned arrival
When I say "near Liverpool" in the end it was almost one hour away, it looked really near in the map that AirBnB showed me, but I guess I did not check the scale :-) So, even though we got up with plenty of time, we found a lot of traffic on the highway and we only got to the port just as the ships were arriving, we almost missed it!
The weather that day was awful, it was very rainy and windy, so not really a nice day to be nosing around the boats but we did our best. I visited all the promotional stands and brought home a lot of reading material.
It was great to be able to finally see the Clipper boats face to face. They are huge but very beautiful! And seeing all the crew parading on deck was a really inspiring sight. I could not help but wonder what was going through their heads. I was expecting to see a lot of happy and smily faces and, though there was a lot of celebration, most of the crew had a kind of somber and introspective look. I guess they could not really believe that what they had been doing for a full year had finally ended and that tomorrow they would wake up somewhere else, far from what had been their home during all this time.
